


Boba Fett Meets Benjamin Franklin: A Tale of Two BFs

by The_8th_House



Category: Benjamin Franklin - Fandom, Boba Fett - Fandom, Bounty hunters - Fandom, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: American History, Gen, Post-Revolutionary War, Star Wars AU, Time Travel, alternative history, inventions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-01-10 00:13:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_8th_House/pseuds/The_8th_House
Summary: After touching down on planet Earth for emergency repairs, Boba Fett makes the acquaintance of a certain Revolutionary war-era historical personage.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to those who have checked out this story so far! I'm busy writing more of Boba Fett's and Benjamin Franklin's story, but since I'm a terrible combination of lazy and easily distracted, when the new chapters will be posted will most likely be random. Thanks for understanding :D

Spiraled arms of stars filled Slave I’s viewscreen as it emerged from hyperspace. Illuminated pillars of gas and dust rose up like a Coruscanti palace’s columns, cold and dense in their serene beauty.  
Boba Fett accessed the navcomputer and read the info of the coordinates he’d punched in for this sector. He’d never been here before. It was way beyond even the most remote Outer Rim planets.  
Milky Way Galaxy, read the screen.  
Slave I’s left wing fin was cracked, thanks to a space slug’s gaping, sharp-toothed mouth that appeared quite suddenly as the ship was docked on the creature’s home asteroid. Imperial cruisers sustained damage often enough the same way. The exogorth hadn’t even been a mature one, but fier’fek, it’d been big enough. Boba would think twice next time before landing on any old space rock to conduct routine maintenance between jobs. He had the last laugh when his ion cannon vaporized the slug into interstellar particles.  
Now he was searching for a decent place to carry out wing repairs. So far, nothing here was remotely habitable, according to the readout’s specs, except for one white and blue swirly marble.  
Earth.  
No Imperial outposts, no spaceports, no advanced technology.  
About as backwater as you can get, Boba thought.  
As long as no other sentient beings got in his way, Earth sounded like the perfect spot to touch down for a bit.  
***  
Benjamin Franklin hunched over his workbench, hard at work on his newest invention. It was a set of musical “singing glasses” called an armonica, made up of nested, cork-lined glass bowls. An iron rod was to be run through the center of the bowls, and the whole thing set on a wheel with a foot pedal which would make the bowls spin. By touching wet fingers to the bowls, while operating the foot pedal, the armonica created haunting, beautiful sounds. Ever since he’d attended a singing glasses concert, Benjamin had become inspired to create one of his own.  
He dipped his fingers in a dish of water and skimmed them over the blown-glass bowls as his foot worked the pedal. Eerie tones rose ghostlike from the device.  
Such an intriguing sound, he thought in contentment.  
A deafening roar unlike anything Benjamin recognized blotted out the armonica’s melody. He jerked his head up at the intrusive noise. It was coming from somewhere beyond his back gate.  
Overcome with curiosity, he wandered into the yard and peered over the rail fence. The yard sloped into a gully that gave way to woodlands on one side and meadows beyond the trees.  
On the farthest side of the meadows, veiled by a copse of birches, Benjamin discovered the source of the racket.  
There sat an oblong, metal object with weather-beaten rusty red and dark, woody green paint. It seemed to sit on a domelike structure, and looked almost like a strange fort.  
Benjamin’s heart pounded in excitement and wonder.  
“Oh, goodness!” he exclaimed. “This is quite an incredible sight!”  
Something jabbed him hard between the shoulder blades.  
“And now that you’ve seen it, you can turn around and go back in the house,” said Boba Fett, “so I can finish what I’m doing in peace.”


	2. Chapter 2

Benjamin whirled around. Boba had his EE-3 carbine rifle aimed squarely at Ben’s chest.  
“Not so fast, old man.”  
Benjamin’s hand flew up to adjust his glasses, in case his eyes were deceiving him. They weren’t. He was sure of that because he’d invented them to correct his presbyopia, a condition that worsened each year and made it increasingly difficult to read small print.  
“Oh dear! What is all this, who are you?”  
“Nobody you know,” Boba said, gesturing with the rifle. “Turn around and start walking and you won’t get hurt.”  
“Now, now, let’s not be hasty! I’m a peaceful person and furthermore, I’m unarmed.”  
The sun glinted off the rifle’s barrel tip with menace. “That’s your problem. Move it.”  
“Wait a moment,” Benjamin said, carefully stepping backwards. There were mouse and vole burrows scattered in the fields that could break your ankle if you tripped on one. “Would you by any chance be a Hessian with a new uniform I have not seen before?”  
Boba’s booted feet made no noise as he stalked through the knee-high grass. “Hessian?”  
“Oh yes; brutal mercenaries from Germany who fought on the side of the redcoats. I heard that one of their commanders wished for more of his soldiers to die so that he could receive more compensation,” Benjamin chuckled. “That’s just a rumor, of course. I wish I could take credit for inventing it.”  
“Riveting story.” Under the helmet, Boba seethed. He’d already had a lot more conversation than he’d planned. Why wermos like this one babbled so much was beyond his comprehension.  
Still, he secretly admired the fictional commander’s style, but would never admit it to this crazy ruug'la jag who did not seem to care that there was a gun pointing at him.  
“You talk too much, old man.”  
“That is one thing I have never been accused of,” returned Benjamin, raising his wispy eyebrows. “My name is Benjamin Franklin, by the way.”  
“I didn’t ask.”  
Benjamin glanced at the rifle. “Might I at least know the name of the one pointing such an interesting looking musket at me?”  
“My name is not your concern.”  
“I daresay it is,” said Benjamin. “This is certainly the last thing I expected when I woke up this morning.”  
“That makes two of us,” growled the bounty hunter.  
Boba had met a lot of strange characters over the years while bounty hunting across the galaxy, but none so bizarre and perplexing as this odd man of advanced age wearing round-framed glasses.  
They reached Benjamin’s back gate.  
“Well, here I am. Home,” he said. “I suppose you are leaving on your contraption?”  
Boba paused while he considered not answering. “Only because you aren’t worth anything to me.”  
Benjamin leaned against the gate with a grin full of mischief. “Well, that is very lucky for me then. I do have some worth, though my son doesn’t agree.”  
“Is that so?”  
“Fought on the side of the Loyalists, contrary to everything I ever taught him or stood for. Do you have a family?”  
Benjamin could not see the darkness cross Boba’s face behind the cold anonymity of his T-shaped visor.  
Boba’s mind flew back to his childhood on rain-soaked Kamino. A collage of images flashed by—his father Jango, wearing the armor that had been silver and blue then; Taun We, who’d help raise him in absence of a biological mother; the secret clone army, all with a face identical to his. He'd never considered them to be his brothers. After all, Boba been the only unaltered clone, and Jango had raised him as his own, not any of the rest of them.  
And then the most awful memory of all, the one that no amount of time would ever lessen : his decapitated father, dead in the sand of an arena on Geonosis.  
Boba clenched his jaw. “I have no family.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Hm,” said Benjamin, eyes narrowing. “No family? That is a shame.”  
“What’s it to you?”  
Benjamin put up his hands in mock surrender. “I surely did not mean any offense, good sir. If only you would stop pointing your musket at me!”  
Boba regarded him for a moment, then slowly lowered the rifle. This crazy barve didn’t seem like any type of threat, not that he was worried or anything. Boba had the resources on him to blow half this place into a smoldering crater. The old man had the firepower of a dead fly in a derelict cantina on Mos Eisley.  
But he was asking invasive questions with impunity. What gave him the right?  
“It’s not your business, old man.”  
Benjamin suspected that if this helmeted intruder was going to shoot him at all, he’d have done it by now. He let his arms fall back by his sides and sighed.  
It certainly hadn’t been the first time he’d been in a dicey situation.  
Unfortunate circumstances pockmarked Benjamin’s life. His older brother James had beaten him for various offences while employed at his printing shop. Another time he’d found himself destitute after spending the last of his money to buy bread. The love of his life, Deborah Read, married another man after Benjamin dilly dallied too long about settling down. Then a governor lied to him about work by reneging on his end of a business deal. And his house was once robbed.  
The worst of these was the falling out with his son William. Benjamin never forgave him for his loyalty to the British Crown, and left him practically nothing in his will.  
“No, I suppose it is not,” Benjamin said. “So what are you, other than a strange character encased in some sort of forged metal and fancy weaponry, the likes of which I have never seen?”  
“I might ask you the same,” said Boba.  
“I am an inventor, author, printer, politician, postmaster, and diplomat, among other things.”  
“Very accomplished,” the bounty hunter said, wanting to smite the slight smile on Benjamin’s face.  
“I’m not one to boast, but I am quite proud of my achievements.”  
Boba assessed him with a cold air of indifference, wondering if he could be some sort of Jedi. The old man did remind him of another smarty pants named Ben. He was even dressed in dun-colored, homespun clothing.  
No, thought Boba. He has no special powers. He’s just a delusional old dotard who talks too much.  
“Are you an extraterrestrial?”  
The question caught Boba off guard. “What?”  
Benjamin gestured at him.  
“Do I look like I come from around here?”  
“Well to be fair,” Benjamin frowned, “no.”  
“Enough talking,” Boba said.  
A sudden frenzy of gobbling and scratching broke out nearby.  
“Oh look, my friends are here,” Benjamin cried out in delight, pointing.  
A flock of wild turkeys strutted into the yard, pecking at the ground and gurgling in such a demanding, bossy way as if they owned the place. The toms fanned their magnificent tails, daring anyone to suggest they were anything less than splendidly handsome.  
“Friends?” said Boba, making no attempt to hide his scorn.  
“The turkey should have been the United States’ official bird instead of the eagle. Bald eagles, as I have stated before, are birds of bad moral character. Turkeys, on the other hand, are a fine example to our colonies, quite respectable and brave, never hesitating to defend--”  
Benjamin was so busy expounding on the virtues of his adopted flock that he failed to notice Boba raising his rifle.


End file.
